By Kevin Jairaj, US Presswire
Nathan Adrian poses during a portrait session at the U.S. Olympic Committee Media Summit in Dallas on May 14.
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As part of USA TODAY Sports' "100 Olympic hopefuls in 100 Days" series, prospective U.S. Olympians give their thoughts on the Games in their own words.
Nathan Adrian saw the U.S. men's come-from-behind victory in the 4x100-meter freestyle relay at the 2008 Olympics from a different perspective than the rest of the captivated world.
MORE: Olympic Hopefuls series
Adrian swam in the preliminaries for the race, then later settled into the stands at the Water Cube for the final. There, the USA's Jason Lezak, swimming the anchor leg, reeled in Frenchman Alain Bernard in the last 25 meters for an astonishing victory that kept U.S. teammate Michael Phelps' march to an historic eight gold medals on track.
Four years later, Adrian is the likely candidate to anchor the U.S. men in the 4x100 free relay at the London Olympics. Lezak swam the third leg and Adrian was anchor at last year's world championships, where the USA finished behind winner Australia and runner-up France.
Adrian, a 23-year-old Washington native studying public health at Cal-Berkeley, recently spoke to reporters at the U.S. Olympic Committee media summit in Dallas.
Probably my most vivid memory of being on the podium is being in the third place spot (at worlds) in the 4x100 freestyle relay. It was really uncomfortable and not fun. I use that a lot in training, in preparing for races, to try and motivate myself to make sure I'm going to throw up a good leg. Because that's the only thing I can control. The nice thing about it is I know that Michael's doing the same thing. I know that all the other guys that are competing for a spot on that relay are doing the same thing.
The relays are hands down more exciting (than individual events), especially because I have been going last in recent years. I can sense how the race is going, how it's flowing, what teams are ahead of us, what teams have good guys coming up. And you kind of sense the crowd too.
There's a lot of pressure associated with that. Sometimes I wish I wasn't going last. But at the end of the day, it's a cool place to be.
I watched (the Beijing relay) with Matt Grevers and Ben Wildman, who were both on the preliminary relay with me. I saw something that I wanted to be able to do when I grow up.
It was just something where (Lezak) kind of transcended the realm of what most people thought was possible. But Jason had a way of doing that - just throwing out some incredible swims in times of need. That's something I took away from that and tried to emulate.
This time around, it's different. There's different people, different players, different countries. It's something that can take, look at, say, 'Hey, that's cool, I would love to do that.' But trying to re-create something that's already happened is impossible. So moving forward and trying to create our own story is kind of the way that I approach it.
The Australians have an incredible amount of depth (in the 4x100 free relay). For such a small country, they have six guys that have gone the A standard to qualify. So they have a potential six guys that could swim individually at the Olympics, although they can only send two. The French guys, they're obviously good too. They beat us last year. The Russians are also good, although last summer they did not do quite as well as people expected (Russia was fifth at worlds). Among those four teams, that's where the competition for the medals in the 4x100 freestyle relay is.
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